4 hours ago
Base Salary
$243k - $450k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define long-term technical strategy and architecture for Homefeed, Search, and AI Assistant, including retrieval, ranking, personalization, and generative experiences.
- Drive a multi-year roadmap to unify signals, features, and models across Pinterest discovery surfaces.
- Lead the design and adoption of large-scale retrieval and ranking systems that improve relevance and monetization.
- Architect the integration of LLMs and foundation models into discovery systems, including query understanding, intent modeling, content understanding, conversation orchestration, and safety guardrails.
- Set technical direction for experimentation, measurement, offline and online evaluation, and causal inference.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership through component design, design and code reviews, prototyping, complex launch support, and risk reduction.
- Partner with Product, Data Science, Research, and Design to translate product opportunities into robust technical plans.
- Raise engineering standards for reliability, performance, security, privacy, cost efficiency, and operational health of large-scale ML systems.
- Represent Pinterest externally through talks, publications, and partnerships, and help attract and develop technical talent.
- Mentor senior engineers and staff-plus technical leaders while driving standards and alignment across organizations.
Requirements
- 15+ years of industry experience in large-scale systems and/or machine learning, with impact in search, recommendations, feeds, or conversational AI.
- Experience as a Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent senior technical leader driving cross-organizational technical strategy and execution.
- Deep expertise in at least two areas including large-scale retrieval and ranking, representation learning, search systems, or large language models and generative AI.
- Experience with retrieval and ranking techniques such as learning-to-rank, multi-task and multi-objective optimization, bandits, or reinforcement learning for recommendations.
- Experience with representation learning, embeddings, multimodal models, dense retrieval, and sparse retrieval.
- Experience with search indexing, query understanding, relevance tuning, and latency or throughput optimization.
- Experience with LLMs and generative AI, including prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, agents, safety or guardrails, and evaluation.
- Demonstrated ability to drive multi-year architectural transformations at scale and modernize legacy systems or ML platforms.
- Strong product intuition and experience partnering with Product Management, Design, and Data Science on ambiguous 0-to-1 and 1-to-N initiatives.
- Exceptional communication skills for articulating strategy, tradeoffs, and technical direction to executives and engineering audiences.
- Experience mentoring and growing senior and staff engineers and building strong engineering cultures.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Prior experience with global-scale consumer discovery products and experience integrating AI assistants or agentic workflows are preferred.
Benefits
- The role is not eligible for relocation assistance.
- Work arrangements vary by team: some require in-office collaboration 1–2 times per quarter and others require approximately one day per week near SF, Palo Alto, or Seattle.
- The position is available to US-based applicants only.
- The position is eligible for equity in addition to the stated base salary.
- Pinterest provides information about company culture and available benefits through its benefits resources.
Categories
About Pinterest
Pinterest's mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. It's the visual inspiration platform where more than 600 million monthly active users worldwide come to search, save, and shop the best ideas in the world for all of life’s moments.